


and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

by seventhstar



Series: e.e. cummings series [4]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Crossdressing Kink, Drama, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 14:06:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4524867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/pseuds/seventhstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yuuma and Ryoga's crossdressing sex adventure, in between bouts of domestic drama.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rangerhitomi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rangerhitomi/gifts).



"Do you know," Shark says, staring past Yuuma at the ceiling, "that you're the first person I've loved who hasn't died?"

Yuuma opens his mouth to protest, but then he stops and can't think of any counterexamples, which is so awful that he has to stop and take Shark's hand in his own. There's nothing worse then not knowing what to say. Sometimes Yuuma feels horribly inadequate at meeting Shark's needs, and if there is anyone who deserves to have a partner who can love and support them, it's Shark.

He supposes there are people who would disagree with them, but Yuuma thinks that if those people could only see Shark when he's sad, the way he pretends not to be until he cracks, the way he'll mumble 'I'm fine' until Yuuma proves he isn't going to be scared off by his tears, they'd change their minds.

It is the middle of the night. Tonight they are awake, not because of nightmares, but because it’s hot in their apartment. Sweat-soaked and sticky, they are lying side by side on top of the covers, waiting for the air conditioning to kick back on, or for the heat to finish stealing the energy from their bones so that exhaustion can overtake them. It’s so warm Yuuma almost doesn’t want to touch him.

Only almost, though, and he doesn’t let of Shark’s hand or shy away from brushing his wet bangs off his forehead.

“We’re all here with you now,” Yuuma says, and he leans in until Shark focuses and looks him in the eye. “It’s okay. You’re not alone.”

Shark doesn’t say anything. It’s stifling in the room, with the heat and silence between them. Yuuma waits.

“Yeah.” It’s so soft, Shark’s voice, but it is there. He closes his eyes.

Yuuma watches him fall asleep, watches the worry lines in his face from his ever-present frown smooth away, until his own eyelids are too heavy for him to do anything else but tuck himself into Shark’s body and dream.

+++++

Ryoga does the laundry on Sunday mornings. Normally he rolls out of bed while Yuuma snores on, throws whatever is in the hamper into the washer, and crawls back under the covers until Yuuma decides to get up and forage for breakfast. But this morning Yuuma left early, moaning and groaning all the way about how unfair Akari was for asking him to help her on the weekend, and so Ryoga watches mindless cooking shows while the laundry washes and dries.

When the dryer beeps, he puts it all in the basket, takes it into the bedroom, and starts folding. His and Yuuma’s clothes are all mixed together — they tried separate hampers, but it didn’t work — and it takes forever to sort out whose underwear and undershirts and socks are whose. It doesn’t help that people have taken to buying them matching clothing as gifts (gifts that Yuuma insists they wear).

He puts away his own clothes first, with everything color-coded and folded neatly and organized because Ryoga likes being able to grope around for clothes five minutes before he has to leave and have no one who sees him know, and then he does Yuuma’s. Yuuma, like Ryoga, is often running late in the morning, but Yuuma’s solution is to wail about how late he is while he throws everything on the floor.

His drawers are a mess. Normally, Yuuma thwarts his attempts to fix them — ‘come back to bed,’ he’ll whine, and Ryoga can never resist — but Yuuma isn’t here today.

He opens Yuuma’s sock drawer. It’s crammed full of socks, none of which are matched or folded. Ryoga yanks the drawer out of the dresser and upends it onto the floor; he hopes Yuuma isn’t particularly attached to any of the ones with holes, because Ryoga plans on throwing every single one of them away.

He digs through the pile, sorting, and at the bottom he finds a little leather-bound book. A journal, with a piece of masking tape with Yuuma’s name in marker on the front cover, presumably hidden in Yuuma’s sock drawer away from prying eyes.

 _Away from me,_ Ryoga thinks, and he checks himself. He’s being unreasonable. If this is Yuuma’s diary, he has every right to keep it private. _And that explains why he never lets me fix the drawers_ _…_

What Ryoga should do is put it back and forget about it, and he nearly does.

_Does he talk about me in there?_

“Of course he does,” Ryoga says aloud, trying to talk himself out of insecurity before it can take root. There’s no reason to assume there’s anything bad about him in the journal, no reason to be hurt that Yuuma has never mentioned such a thing, no reason for Ryoga to pry —

— but the thought is there, _maybe he doesn_ _’t love me after all_ , and Ryoga bites his lip and opens it anyway.

+++++

Yuuma loves Akari, but he wishes she would stop throwing pens at him when she’s angry. She gets this look in her eye that says he’s made a terrible mistake, and he cringes, and she has great aim, and now there’s ink all over his forehead.

It’s that cringing that Yuuma thinks of immediately when he sees Shark. His ‘welcome back’ is softer than normal, and when their eyes meet Shark flinches and looks anywhere but at Yuuma and his spoon scrapes loudly across the bottom of the pan. Shark hates that noise, but he doesn’t even appear to have noticed this time.

“Hey,” Yuuma says.

“Hey.” Shark dumps whatever’s in the pan — vegetables? They look kind of burnt — onto a plate. “How was it?”

“Good! Sis said she got what she needed.”

Shark makes him up a bowl of food, and yes, those are burned vegetables, Yuuma realizes when the bowl is in his hands, which isn’t like Shark at all. He doesn’t say anything though. When Shark is jittery like this, Yuuma isn’t sure what to do. Does he say something and risk embarrassing Shark so Shark knows Yuuma notices, or does he let Shark have his pride and risk him thinking Yuuma is oblivious?

Today he picks silence, and he eats the bitter food with a smile.

They eat without conversation until Yuuma starts talking again. He tells Shark every detail of his day, starting with how Akari needed him to be her assistant and carry all her equipment and ending with how one of the politicians being interviewed got destroyed by Akari’s pointed questions. He is very proud of Akari, who is enormously talented and probably going to win all the journalism awards in the world someday (there’s already a shelf at home full of them), and it’s easy to keep going on and on and on.

He half-expects Shark to get fed up and stop him, but Shark doesn’t. He hardly ever does, no matter how long Yuuma rambles about anything.

“And then he threw his drink at her,” Yuuma finishes.

“Did she let him walk out of there alive?”

“She caught him doing it on film. I think it’s gonna be on the news tomorrow.”

“That’s good.”

Yuuma frowns; Shark’s tongue is normally much sharper than that. “Yeah, it’s —”

Shark cuts him off by blurting out a sentence, so quickly Yuuma has to pause and replay the garbled noise in his head to understand.

“I found your journal and I read it and I’m sorry.”

“You what?” Yuuma’s breath catches — it was buried in the sock drawer Ryoga hated, he thought it was safe. No one else even knew Yuuma kept a journal besides his mother, who kept one as well. She thought it would help him cope, afterward. It did, so Yuuma never stopped, although it’s been harder than he thought it would be, finding time to write secretly in his and Shark’s apartment.

But of all the people that could have found the journal…of course it was Shark, the last person he would want to see it.

“I was organizing your sock drawer,” Shark says. He still can’t meet Yuuma’s eyes.

Yuuma nods. He wants to ask, ‘what did you read?’, but he’s terrified of the answer, because the last three months of his journal have been…well….they’ve been —

“Look, I didn’t read all of it, I—” Ryoga sucks in a breath, the way he does when he’s psyching himself up. Yuuma remembers vividly him doing the same thing before he asked Yuuma to move in, and the first time he ever asked Yuuma if he wanted a ride home (they’d driven to the edge of the city and made out instead).

“Can we talk about the sex stuff,” he mumbles, and Yuuma nearly bolts from the room.

“..you saw it?”

Ryoga nods.

Yuuma winces. The last three months of his journal are of his dreams, which have been increasingly explicit and uncomfortably kinky. Writing them down would exorcise them, he thought. It didn’t work. He still has the desires, twisted as they are.

Writing them down was supposed to make them go away, and instead — Ryoga knows.

“You weren’t supposed to see any of that.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why wouldn’t you show it to me?” Shark stumbles over his words. “I mean — there’s no one else, right?”

“Of course not!”

Shark flinches. “Well, what I supposed to think —”

“I would never —”

“I thought we weren’t keeping secrets anymore!”

“I didn’t — I didn’t want to bother you!”

“Why would you be bothering me?”

“I don’t know, sometimes you wake p in the middle of the night crying!”

“What does that have to do with nything?”

“I’m scared of making it worse!”

“Well, you’re fucking making it worse now!”

“Fine, I’ll just leave!” Yuuma yells before his brain can intercede, and then he’s said it and has to back it up, so he grabs his wallet off the kitchen counter (Shark hates that) and marches out the front door.

He slams it loudly behind him. Then he stands out in the hallway, shoulders shaking, and wonders where he’s going now.

+++++

Yuuma is still gone in the morning, a vague note left on the fridge in handwriting that is even messier than usual, and Ryoga lies in his cold bed, aware of the empty space beside him. He thinks perhaps he will never get up.

And then he does, and life goes on for a while.

Rio calls, and she tells him about her classes. She complains about her textbooks and describes the paper she is writing, the one about ancient art. There is no discussion of dating; Rio always says that she is uninterested in romance,  and while normally she has an angry rant or two about someone refusing to take the hint, today there is nothing. It’s a relief whenever she doesn’t have one; Ryoga’s protective instincts are slow to fade even when the danger is minimal.

Then he joins Kaito and Chris and Thomas for dinner; he and Thomas snipe at each other for an hour, and it almost is enough to ease the jealous ache of the way Chris and Kaito’s fingers brush on the tabletop. Kaito ropes him into promising he and Yuuma will attend Haruto’s school play.

 _Kaito spoils Haruto,_ Ryoga thinks, _but he_ _’s a good kid._

And then the sun is setting and he is pulling up outside their building, alone. He avoids the elevator instead of the stairs, despite the twenty floor walk up to their apartment, but even that doesn’t distract him. He’s at their front door much too quickly.

What if Yuuma isn’t in there?

What if Yuuma _is?_

“I’m home,” Ryoga calls into the living room. It’s mercifully empty, and no one answers — there’s no sign of Yuuma except for a pile of blankets on the couch — and he sighs. He lets his coat drop onto a chair and throws his keys on the counter. Yuuma must be really angry, if he hasn’t yet come home.

_I should have just kept my mouth shut._

He slumps down onto the couch, and lets his head fall into his hands. He’s fucked it up again.

The blankets beside him move.

And now that Ryoga is paying attention, he can see that’s it’s not multiple blankets but just one, and there’s pink and black hair poking out from underneath. He pushes the comforter back, and there Yuuma is, curled up on the couch, glaring at him.

“Yuuma?”

“Shhh.” Yuuma yanks the blanket back down. “I’m not here.”

Ryoga blinks. This is new. And annoying.

 “Oi. What are you doing?”

“I thought you wouldn’t see me!”

Ryoga rolls his eyes. He pulls the blanket off again, and this time Yuuma sits up, wraps himself in it, and looks morose. There’s that twinge of guilt in Ryoga’s heart — why is he hiding from me — but then Yuuma speaks.

“Sorry.”

Only Yuuma can make everything worse by being understanding.

“Forget about it,” Ryoga says thickly. “It doesn’t matter.”

_It matters, but not enough that I_ _’m willing to lose you over it._

The blanket is thrown over his head, and then Yuuma is practically in his lap so that they are both in a tent of blue fabric, nestled close so that they can both fit. Yuuma takes his hands.

“Sometimes,” and Yuuma leans in, over his shoulder, lips against Ryoga’s ear, “I have nightmares, too.”

“You never say anything,” Ryoga says.

“It’s harder for you.” Yuuma shrugs. “I don’t wanna make it worse, you know? But —” he hesitates. “We can talk about it now if you want.”

“Yeah. Okay.”


End file.
